“Just a note to say that my B4RN installation finished today with the completion of my own network configuration so I am now using it and it is quite excellent.

Huge huge thanks to you and to all the team who worked so hard to make everything happen. It is greatly appreciated.

Please pass on all my thanks to your brother and everyone else who have been giving up so much of their very valuable time to make this exceptional facility a reality”.

Summer bulletin B4RN 27 July 2014

It’s been a while since our last bulletin but a lot has happened in the meantime. We have now dug over 5km of trenches and laid about 8km of ducting. Two of our core routes in Borwick are all but complete. We are almost there with our first core route in Priest Hutton and about to start the next, running from the village hall towards the back of the old school.

We now have individual feeds laid to 36 property boundaries in Borwick and 17 in Priest Hutton. Remember, it is the responsibility of the householder to lay the duct from the property boundary to the house. B4RN volunteers will then come along to every house requiring a connection and install the internal router and external gas stop (to prevent ground-sourced radon gas from entering the house). We now have a good stock of house installation kits and have already done 2 houses in Priest Hutton, so as soon as you have laid the duct to the house, please get in touch with me and I can arrange for your router to be installed. We will have over 100 house installations to do in the two villages, so the sooner we get started the better.

The ‘when’ question comes up almost every day now and it would be great to have a schedule for the grand ‘switch-on’. The reality, however, is that we are very much in the hands of others at this stage – waiting for the County Council for the road crossings and for the B4RN technicians for the fibre blowing and cabinet installation. Our ‘aspiration’ is that our first users will be live by mid-autumn and we are working to make sure that our connections to the village hall are completed in good time.

Our team of diggers has put in some sterling work over the last few months and overcome each and every challenge that has come their way. We have also been joined on several occasions recently by volunteers (Susie, Pat and Robin) from Whittington, who are hoping to get their B4RN project going shortly. We are very grateful for all their hard work and good company. Progress has been helped by the generosity and kindness, cake, coffee and tea (along with the occasional bacon buttie) provided by residents of Borwick & Priest Hutton along the way. It has been much appreciated.

We plan to continue with our schedule of working Tuesdays and Wednesdays most weeks and the occasional Saturday where we can. If you would like to join us, even for a few hours, your contribution will be much appreciated. We need all the help we can get. Just drop me an email to find out where we are working.

Many, many thanks to all the volunteers who have generously given their time and energy on this project. We continue to have fun on our cake-fuelled progress and we are all looking forward to the next phase where we move from digging to ‘blowing’.